Years Ago

Today is Saturday, Dec. 7, the 341st day of 2013. There are 24 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1787: Delaware becomes the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

1796: Electors choose John Adams to be the second president of the United States.

1808: Electors choose James Madison to be the fourth president of the United States.

1842: The New York Philharmonic performs its first concert.

1909: In his State of the Union address, President William Howard Taft defends the decision to base U.S. naval operations in the Pacific at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, instead of in the Philippines.

1911: China abolishes the requirement that men wear their hair in a queue, or ponytail.

1941: Japan launches a surprise attack on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as part of its plan to conquer Southeast Asian territories; the raid, which claims some 2,400 American lives, prompts the United States to declare war against Japan the next day.

1972: America’s last moon mission to date is launched as Apollo 17 blasts off from Cape Canaveral.

1982: Convicted murderer Charlie Brooks Jr. becomes the first U.S. prisoner to be executed by injection, at a prison in Huntsville, Texas.

1987: Some 43 people are killed after a gunman aboard a Pacific Southwest Airlines jetliner in California apparently opens fire on a fellow passenger, the pilots and himself, causing the plane to crash.

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev sets foot on American soil for the first time, arriving for a Washington summit with President Ronald Reagan.

1988: A major earthquake in the Soviet Union devastates northern Armenia; official estimates put the death toll at 25,000.

Federal agents seize three guns and more than an ounce of suspected heroin from two alleged drug dealers in Boardman.

Oldies 93 (WBBG-FM) and the Muscular Dystrophy Association are helping to reunite the Youngstown group, The Human Beinz, that reached number eight in the 1967 charts with the hit “Nobody But Me.”

1973: The Packard Electric Division of General Motors announces that 850 production employees will be laid off.

A service station attendant is shot in the stomach in one of three armed robberies occurring within an hour. Melvin Bruss, 18, is in satisfactory condition in St. Elizabeth Hospital.

An investigation by Youngstown police determines that Edward Coar, who died Oct. 8 of burns received in a city jail fire, was “the principal” in the arson blaze, which was aimed at allowing him to escape.

1963: The constitutionality of Ohio’s Sunday closing laws is upheld by the 7th District Court of Appeals, reversing a ruling by Youngstown Municipal Court Judge Don L. Hanni Jr.

More than $50 million in additional money for education, highways, recreation and aid to the unemployed may pour into the Youngstown district economy as a result of action taken by the General Assembly in a year-end recessed session.

State Rep. Elbert Lampson, 59, an Ashtabula Republican, is in critical condition in St. Joseph Hospital in Warren after his car struck a B&O freight train in Champion Township.

1938: The Ohio Public Service Co. loses a fight to prevent the village of Newton Falls from constructing a municipal light plant.

Oscar Hahn, 13, is told by Ohio Penitentiary Chaplain Father John Sullivan that Gov. Martin Davey has denied clemency to Oscar’s mother, who is scheduled to die in the electric chair for poisoning a man.